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Program Title
Credits Producer: Tony Wharmby Director: Tony Wharmby Intro LOVE FOR LYDIA/Episode 1/Intro by Alistair Cooke Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke. Tonight--and I'm surprised to realize it myself--we begin the ninth season of Masterpiece Theatre, which began in January 1971 with The First Churchills. And the series we start tonight will be the forty-ninth dramatic series to be presented on Masterpiece Theatre. Tonight, after our long love affair with Edwardian England, we have a change of pace and take a great jump into provincial England in 1929. And that was the year when English craftsmen confidently built this sort of awesome symbol as a sign of industrial prosperity. But within a year or two it would become a memorial to what the English called not The Roaring--but The Careless--Twenties. Our story begins in 1929 but it will move as relentlessly as the Depression itself into the Threadbare Thirties. We come down from the lords and ladies and come up from the cooks and housemaids to middle-class people, with a twelve-part series called Love for Lydia, written by the man whose short stories we dramatized in Country Matters. He is, of course, H. E. Bates, and it all takes place in a small English Midland factory town of the nineteenth-century sort, which had only one big house in the surrounding countryside, one fortune. I'll come back to the setting, which is that of Bates' childhood, after a little brush-up reminder about Bates himself. Now, he was born in 1906 in the county of Northamptonshire of humble origins in a small industry and large farming country. I should say that the social structure of the part of the country that H. E. Bates grew up in is not unlike that of those small Midwestern factory towns where the electrician knows the neighboring farmer, the banker knows the house painter, and the reporter knows everybody. Bates himself, after grammar school, became a reporter at the age of sixteen. And the editor in the early episodes of this series will give you a sharp idea of why he loathed newspaper reporting and why he quit as soon as he could. He went into a warehouse as a packer and he worked evidently on a piece basis because he was done with his work by–ten or eleven and he spent the rest of the day writing short stories, which nobody printed. And then came a novel that he hawked around ten publishers before he found one who liked it and gave him what all authors fear and crave: an advance. They fear it because the book may be a flop and then they're left with the guilt of a con man. They crave it because it might set them free. And that's what it did for Bates. The enormous sum of twenty-five pounds, fifty dollars at the going rate, liberated him forever from the local town and the local newspaper. But only in the flesh. In the spirit, time and again he returned to Evensford--this small Northampton country town, factory town, where by the way this film was made for eighteen months and where the fascinating witch, Lydia Aspen, will strike a string of males. It is the cold winter of 1929 and the young newspaper reporter, Richardson, is sent up to the big house of the Aspens. The head of the household was formerly an old man who'd lived away for some time. He'd just died, and Richardson goes up to interview the remaining owners or inhabitants, two spinster sisters and a sort of hanger-on brother. But mainly he goes to find out what they have in mind for the dead man's daughter, who is about to arrive to live in the house and is likely to be the heiress to the family fortune. Love for Lydia, episode one.  Episode number: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
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